38. Behind the Scenes: How We Plan the Marketing for our Almost Million Dollar Fundraising Campaign

Erika Payne joins me again to talk marketing planning for CoMoGives month by month. In this episode, we explore what our process looks like for the entire year, from the end of last year's campaign to the end of the next year's. It's essentially a ton of documenting, testing, and celebrating, but with structure.

HOW IT ALL FLOWS

DEC

1. Keep track of all the things that didn’t go right in a document

JAN-FEB

2. Review the document and all data after campaign, quickly so it’s not lost

a. Brainstorm how to improve in the pain point areas 

3. Survey donors

4. Attend the member recap to hear what orgs think was good or bad

5. Reconcile the previous year’s numbers

MARCH-MAY

6. Really dig into marketing data so we can make a plan for next year based on what worked

7. Brainstorm ways to improve and market

8. Pitch those ideas to the client

9. Set new year campaign goal

10. Estimate and schedule ideas for the website

11. Create Participant Sign up form & Test

JUNE-JULY

12. Form a focus group of nonprofits

13. Plan marketing workshop

a. Plan training for nonprofits

14. Start updating website

15. Open up organization registration

16. Plan & schedule marketing activities

a. Schedule everything humanly possible for marketing

AUGUST-SEPTEMBER

17. Train nonprofits on how to use the website

18. Hold training workshop for nonprofits

19. Work in making improvements to the website

20. Design Marketing

a. Social media

b. Ads

c. Emails

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER

21. Review/Revise marketing materials  

22. Continue making improvements to the website

23. Look at list of improvements, decided if there are any we need to hold off on until next year. 

24. TEST TEST TEST everything on the website 

a. Then test again

25. Adjust hosting capacity 

26. Make sure the payment portal is setup and and ready to take payments

a. Then test yet again

DECEMBER

27. Turn on the Campaign!

28. Support nonprofits as campaign runs

29. Review all data daily and put into spreadsheet to see benchmarks

30. Adjust marketing as needed

31. Encourage nonprofits

32. Celebrate successes

33. Document stuff we want to change for next year

34. Celebrate the campaign end!

For a fully-formatted article version of this podcast, head over to our website: https://mayecreate.com/blog/behind-the-scenes-how-we-plan-the-marketing-to-our-local-million-dollar-fundraising-campaign/